Taking the Public Cloud Private: Microsoft Azure Stack

Today there has been a lot of interesting discussion within the organization I work for around the public cloud. The trend has been that the public cloud has been growing in popularity and in use. One of the discussion points around the public cloud was what was helping drive the increased adoption and use. Ironically, as this discussion of using the public cloud is happening, Microsoft was announcing that they are releasing the Microsoft Azure Stack.

Microsoft’s announcement of the Microsoft Azure Stack helps to show what the big players in the cloud space are doing to make it even easier for organizations to prepare for moving into or using the public cloud. Using the Azure Stack, a company can install and use some of the Azure cloud features locally and thus in a hybrid cloud manner. The goal is for these local systems to use the same tools as the version in the Azure cloud space. A big benefit of this is that when the company’s IT team gets more comfortable with how the cloud works locally; it becomes a low-to-no impact to shift to the public cloud.

The Azure Stack promises to use the same portal, a application model, and DevOps tools as the public cloud version of Azure. Additionally, the same type of support will be available from Visual Studio whether you are using Azure locally or in the cloud.

The Azure Stack that gets released this Friday, the 29th of January, is not a full-fledged version of Azure. Rather Microsoft will be rolling features into Azure Stack over time. The plans are to start with core features and then expand from there. Over time, you can expect to see more services and content added.

Of course, Channel9 from Microsoft posted a video on why customers love Azure Stack. This is a bit of marketing, but in case you are interested, I’ve posted it here:

With Azure Stack, Microsoft is upping the ante on the Cloud. The Cloud market is already a 110 Billion dollar industry growing at 28%. As such, it is when you add what Microsoft is doing to the continued evolution of offerings from other big players such as Amazon’s AWS, and when you look at the support of initiatives such as OpenStack, it is clear that the Cloud is here in full force, public or otherwise.